Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  Master Silas had taken the task to lead these people to safety for one reason more than just that it had to be done and he was capable. He was also a teacher, and according to most, a good one, and when Marjan had made contact with the guild after ten long years without so much as a sighting, leading a party to safety and levelling the enemy, it had been decided that the student wizard needed some assessment. Soonest. After all he had been expelled from the Guild as too many others had over the years, but the Guild never lost track of those they had sent away. They watched them closely, maybe even more closely than the students that remained behind, not that they mentioned that fact to anyone.

  They had to know whether the former members were growing in strength, many did not without their lessons, and more importantly whether they were growing straight. Too many didn’t. They let anger and bitterness consume them, and away from the Guild, they quickly or slowly forgot the rules as well. But Marjan had somehow escaped their gaze.

  A few days, maybe a tenday after he had been expelled, Marjan had simply vanished from the sight of those watching him, and the crystal orbs and scrying ponds had found no trace of him. Search parties sent to his last location had found nothing, not even tracks, and the hounds had lost his scent. It was almost as though the boy had fallen off the face of the world.

  Some of course had said he’d died. It was the logical answer, even if it didn’t explain why the hounds couldn’t find his body or the hunters his tracks. Others had said he had found a way to hide, though for such a young student that seemed unlikely. Not when the combined strength and knowledge of maybe thirty masters was looking for him. Regardless of the truth, in the end, nothing had been found and the matter had been forgotten, as it had to be.

  Until a tenday or more before when the boy had suddenly reappeared from nowhere, stronger, far more disciplined, far more knowledgeable than he had been. That should be impossible. But as his messages had kept coming night after night and the masters of the guild had looked on in private, they knew it was true. So they sent a teacher in to find out how. Somehow Silas wasn’t expecting them to be happy when they heard what he’d found.

  The boy was growing, growing in strength and knowledge and wisdom and perhaps most important of all, character. He was growing fast, his magic now almost instinctive as he moved beyond the need for gestures and spells, and his knowledge was keeping pace with it. In ten years he had surpassed the level of both adept and journeyman, something that should have happened had he been a student still under the guidance of the masters, but he was further advanced than even that. His knowledge and power was at least that of an artisan, and any wizard of that sort of level in their lands, the guild should have known about. But there was worse.

  The boy had a master. He was being taught. Someone or some thing was teaching him, shaping him into a wizard of surpassing strength and knowledge. That was clear, even if Marjan himself did not seem to realise it. But what was also clear, and which the masters would hate when they learned of it, was that his teacher was not a wizard. Marjan was growing away from the ways of wizardry, even if he didn’t realise that either. He had the knowledge, and the practice and the magic was always the same, but the feel, the way he seemed to somehow be a part of the world around him, the magic flowing through both him and it as though they were one, that was something else.

  That was druidry, or maybe, though the thought left him shaking, of the priests. There was something there, subtle and ill defined perhaps, that spoke of the divine, and it would explain how he could have vanished so completely when first he’d been expelled. But if the divine was working through him somehow, that spoke of larger events in the world to come. Larger perhaps then those they had already seen. The gods and goddesses as the bards kept telling them, did not do small.

  For the longest time Silas kept standing there, staring blankly into the distance, not even looking as the captain went about his business of setting up the caravan for a new direction to travel. He let only two thoughts echo through his mind. The first that what he had seen already was strange and unexpected, and a riddle that badly needed answering. The second that he didn’t want to have tell any of this to the rest of the masters.

  He didn’t even want to tell it to himself.

  ****************

  Chapter Five.

  Marjan kept blasting, sending his lightning bolts streaking down the hill at the army of beasts attacking them, and killing them dozens at a time, but still he knew he was in trouble. They all were. With all his most powerful arrows cast and the beasts still coming in their waves, things were bad. He hadn’t expected to face so many of the enemy at once. Actually since separating from the rest of the caravan at the Crossroads, he hadn’t expected to face any at all and he briefly cursed his stupidity for having listened to the words of the guild wizards as they told them the road ahead was safe. It wasn’t the first time he’d cursed it.

  No beasts. That was what the Guild wizards had told him but then they weren’t heading south to Calibra and hadn’t checked out the road for themselves, just scried it. So how could they have truly known that there were none beyond the crossroads? That they could take the road south to Calibra in complete safety? The answer was obvious in hindsight, they hadn’t. They had only been guessing. And yet it had seemed like such a reasonable assumption at the time. The enemy was streaming down from the north and they were well ahead of him heading south.

  So what had gone wrong? Where had they all come from? And what about the party of rangers that were coming to meet them? Were they close? Were they already victims of the horde? He kept asking himself those same questions, over and over again, as he conserved his strength and waited for each new attack on the hill, hoping to kill as many as possible with as little effort as he could. Naturally he got no answer.

  Already many hundreds maybe thousands of the dire wolves and boars were dead, their bodies littering the hillside like leaves in fall, the smell of roasting flesh and burnt fur filled the air, stinging his eyes, and yet there was no seeming end to the beasts entering the battleground. And he had to win. He had to win for them. He had to win for Ferris and the group he was leading coming up behind them, maybe only twelve hours behind them. But how could you win when the enemy seemed to have no end of soldiers? Still it didn’t help to panic. He watched a dozen or so blackened hell boar corpses start sliding down the steep hill to join their brethren, drew a few more deep breaths to calm himself and waited for the next group.

  They wouldn’t be far away, only the steepness of the hill they’d climbed to escape having slowed them down. It had taken him an inordinate amount of the magic of force to push all of them, twenty one children, three adults, a dozen horses and a goat as well as himself, up the treacherous, mud soaked incline, and then to open up a cave for them to take shelter in. It surely couldn’t be that much easier for the beasts. Four legs or not, the ground was close to liquid and the two or three hundred feet of hill almost vertical. Even if he didn’t blast them as they approached surely they’d be all but unable to reach them, and he needed a rest. What he really needed was to catch all of the enemy together in one place, and then destroy them with a single spell, but with a spell that required less effort, and preferably something not of the elemental. His magic of fire and lightning were already nearly used up as he’d fallen back on them as his first line of war spells, and he needed something else. Something of the earth perhaps, but he couldn’t summon an earth elemental and in this rainstorm, it wouldn’t have lasted very long even if he could have. The rain was simply soaking everything through.

  That gave him an idea, and before the next pack could attack he began using his earth magic to cut away at the sides of the hill, turning their hilltop fortress into a land castle, hundreds of feet high. Few animals, magical or otherwise, could scale vertical walls, though that wouldn’t stop these ones trying. They were frightening in their savagery but thankfully not bright.

  “Are you alright?” Essaline’s voice came
from out of the small cave where she and the others were sheltering, and he guessed she’d heard the silence as he stopped casting lightning bolts. No doubt she was worried that he was out of strength, and she had good reason to worry. He’d cast too many bolts already and though they weren’t his most powerful blasts, he was tired.

  “I’m fine my lady. Stay inside the cave please.” The strange thing was that he was good, better than he had any right to be. Ever since the battle at Lochore Bridge he’d felt the magic coursing through his veins as it never had before, clean and strong, and even having been casting fireballs and lightning bolts for half an hour he wasn’t completely exhausted. Now by switching to earth magic, he was giving himself a little more breathing room and soon he would be able to start casting bolts and fireballs again if he needed to.

  In time, a surprisingly short time since the ground was completely water logged, he was done, and their cave was suddenly all but unassailable, at least by land bound creatures, and so far the enemy had brought no drakes against them. As he sat on top of their newly formed castle, breathing deeply and looking down upon their enemy as his troops assembled in numbers, Marjan knew a feeling of relief, the first he had known in some time. But he knew more than that, he knew hope as for the first time since the battle had begun he had an idea of how to win it. The endless puddles and piles of mud that the beasts were trudging through below them, told him that.

  It wasn’t subtle or magnificent, just another cunning plan, surprisingly similar to the one he had used at Lochore Bridge, but he knew in his heart it would work. He would just have to wait until all of the enemy were in view. It would be better to use one large spell rather than hundreds of little ones.

  Master Silas had told him that the enemy had come upon the city in waves, large waves but still only one per day. Why they did that, or even how, was unclear, but it was still the key to victory. Destroy the first wave, no matter how many thousand it might be, and they would have time to flee.

  “What’s happening?” Zan was surprisingly gruff for a dryad, but he was also nervous and with so many children under his protection, he had a right to be.

  “Nothing. I’m resting, and the cave is now on top of a cliff instead of a hill, the enemy is unable to reach us. The enemy’s gathering in numbers below us and I want to catch them in a trap all at once. So please be calm and let me rest and summon my strength.” Of course his words fell on deaf ears and he watched as the dryad’s head, so easily recognisable from behind because of his strangely torn ears, cautiously emerged from the entrance as he peered down over the land below.

  The dryad master was a strange sort, gruff and bold where his people were usually neither, and despite his slight build, a formidable archer. He also seemed to have an almost instinctive knowledge of the lands they were travelling through, despite never having been here before, and more then once Marjan had relied on his knowledge to bolster his own since he too was now in lands he’d seldom travelled.

  Master Zan said something then, something in his native tongue which Marjan didn’t understand but which sounded suspiciously like a curse, perhaps he should have studied some more languages in his time at the Guild, and then retreated back inside the cave presumably to tell everyone else what was happening, what he had seen. Marjan let him go without comment. He just needed to rest for a bit, and recover.

  Half an hour passed like that and then a full hour as the enemy kept gathering, scenting their prey in front of them, sensing their weakness, but still unable to reach them as they scratched and tore at the vertical mud walls of the cliff, and Marjan ignored them. All he did was recharge his magic from the well of life all around him and prepare for the work to come, and occasionally keep reminding the rest to keep their heads inside the cave as they refused to stay safe inside it. It actually helped that the rain was coming down on him, as that rain was the very essence that he intended to shape.

  Eventually he knew that the time had come as he saw the enemy below, thousands upon thousands of beasts all snarling their fury and pawing at the ground angrily, a sea of beasts crashing against the cliff wall in waves of unrelenting fury, some of them jumping on the backs of their fellow beasts to get even a few feet closer, but unable to reach them, while no more were coming from behind. The entire army was committed, and more important still, he felt strong, refreshed from his rest.

  The soldiers too were there, inhuman, evil and disturbingly soulless creatures with just enough intelligence to try and scout around the cliff, looking for other ways up though there were none for many leagues. Theirs was a fortunate location. They also fired arrows at him from time to time as they remembered their weapons, but two or three hundred feet up as they were, their mundane bows simply didn’t have the range and he ignored them. The arrows just hit the vertical walls and fell back down on the enemy army, hopefully injuring a few, not that they cared.

  “What now?” Essaline, Zan Reed and Avril were all lying on the ground at the mouth of the cave below him, staring down at the enemy, and he had no doubt their heavily tanned faces would have been pale as they saw the extent of the enemy’s army. All he could see though were the backs of their heads and their long hair fluttering in the gentle breeze. Soon though, he promised himself silently, they would know another emotion and he would see relief on their faces.

  “Shush! Let me work please.”

  He began casting his magic at the ground at the furthest edges of the army, using the rain that was falling and soaking into the ground to soften it, slowly, carefully, and then he drew the water from the underground streams nearby to help. He wanted none to escape his trap. To kill, especially to kill so many, indiscriminately was an anathema to him, as it should be to any wizard, but he could see with his wizard sight what they were, feel them, and he knew that nothing of what lay below them was either natural or had a soul. Death was not just the best thing for them, it was the only thing.

  For a long while it seemed as if nothing was happening, and the beasts continued roaring their defiance at them and the soldiers kept firing arrows at them, they weren’t that bright, and his three teachers from the academy kept pestering him with questions and muttering among themselves as they could see nothing changing. But then there came a new sound, alarm. Just a few snarls of surprise and confusion at first, but they slowly grew in number as the beasts furthest from the front lines of the army started finding themselves wading up to their necks in mud.

  Naturally they didn’t understand, and they tried to wade out of it, heading for their pack mates, and when that failed they tried swimming, but they were out of luck. The mud followed them, clung to them, and weighed them down.

  Soon it was more than a few creatures that were panicking, and the beasts started tearing at one another as they tried to get to safety, jumping on top of each other, as if that would help. The soldiers too were bothered, as they looked back at the periphery of their army behind them, wondering what was happening, but they didn’t try to run. Perhaps to them, survival wasn’t so important any longer, and perhaps death would be a welcome relief from whatever unnatural life powered them. Then again, trapped between a cliff face and the ring of mud, they had nowhere to run to anyway.

  Unbothered he continued his work, continually adding more and more water to the soil all around, turning it from a deep muddy bog into something far more deadly, a lake of quicksand, and in time he saw the beasts at the edges of the army, start sinking all the way into it, panicking and roaring savagely, only to be slowly lost to sight, while their mates all pressed in closer and closer to the cliff, knowing that death was approaching from behind, or that their prey was still in front of them. It wouldn’t save them. Even the trees around them were slowly sinking into the swamp he was creating.

  As the long minutes went by he kept adding to his trap, closing it slowly in on the enemy, and the numbers of beasts sinking into it went from dozens to hundreds, the trees all around them slowly following them down into the mud as well. Yet still the soldiers
did nothing except yell at him. That bothered him. The beasts were frightened sensing death approaching, maybe, or maybe they were just confused and sensing their prey escaping, but their masters apparently knew no such emotion, only hatred and the endless need to destroy. He wondered what sort of terrible magic could have created such a strange madness in them.

  Twenty minutes, half an hour later his work was complete and he watched with something between sorrow and satisfaction as the last of the army slowly slipped into the quicksand immediately at the foot of the cliff below them, a soldier on a black, misshapen horse of some sort. The soldier made vague attempts at swimming as he went down, while the horse panicked and struck out in all directions with hooves that looked more like talons, black fire streaming from its nostrils, but neither could save themselves, and soon they too had disappeared below the surface never to be seen again, and silence returned to the land.